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Raj Ayyar: Jack, I really enjoyed reading The Tomcat Chronicles. It's a wonderful erotic romp, punctuated with humor, on-the-road restlessness and great honesty. Tell me, what prompted you to write Tomcat?
Jack Nichols: In 1991, Bill Watson, the publisher of TWN and the then-new Contax, a statewide bar guide, telephoned wondering if I'd be willing to write "some erotic stories" for his new venture. "You can use a pen name," he assured me and I replied, "Thank you, but I'll use my own name and I'll tell you my true stories. Just when did you want precocious me to begin this memoir? When I was eleven?"
"No," he laughed.
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 GayToday editor Jack Nichols in 1962 during his travels
as described in his latest book |
So I started the Chronicles by remembering springtime, 1961. I'd just turned 23 but was at a late point in my first affair with a long-term partner. After this stretch of seemingly rational stability was over, I embraced its opposite, taking off on a wild spree. I was fully conscious that I was deliberately
trying to catch up with a romantic dream of my own creation. I hitchhiked with a handsome hillbilly who'd gone AWOL from the military. We crossed a variety of state lines, both of us depending, as Tennessee Williams once put it, on the kindness of strangers. The Tomcat Chronicles tempted me as a writer because an erotic memoir written in hindsight allows room to spout off about things observed or learned on the open road, in the heat of passion
Raj Ayyar: Is Tomcat an erotic autobiography? Is the 'Jack' persona at least part fictional?
Jack Nichols: Its an erotic memoir, but covering only 2 years in my life. The 'Jack' persona isn't fictional
at all. I'm talking from my inner self about real experiences. But I will say, I've learned that how we see ourselves often reflects certain fictions about ourselves or others that we may have unconsciously created. I've tried to keep a stern eye on my own myths - my self-created visions, something I think that my new book shows. Near the beginning, for example, I gently admit how I romanticized a newly-met hunk, saying: "I placed a wreath around his neck at a time, perhaps, when he deserved only a boutonnière."
Raj Ayyar: Some prudes are going to read the book as pornography. But, I see it as miles apart from the mechanical suck/fuck dynamics of the average porn novel or movie. It's almost as if the political radical, the dreamer and the writer in Jack Nichols are always there in the background, even in the steamiest sex scenes, to where the book becomes a work of queer art. Any comment?
Jack Nichols: Well, I'm present in the background because it's a book written in hindsight. It reflects somewhat on what it was I was learning in that long-ago, recalling the insights the road offered me.
Raj Ayyar: In many ways, Tomcat represents a maturation and flowering of the gay self-image in that it avoids the maudlin 'doomed queer' motif--what I call the Death in Venice syndrome. Jack plunges into his many sexual adventures with unrepentant gusto, unrepressed horniness and great sexual adventurousness. How did you personally avoid the guilty, doomed, closeted self-image of many gays in the '50's and early '60's?
Jack Nichols: I came out in 1951, a decade before the period described in The Tomcat Chronicles.
By 1953, I'd already read pioneering gay writers like Edward Carpenter and Donald Webster Cory, not to mention the Calamus poems in Whitman's Leaves. In 1960 I met the father of gay militancy, Frank Kameny, and I suppose that for a while we were two of the least guilty, most hopeful and uncloseted
gay men on the block.
Raj Ayyar: That Mattachine stalwart Frank Kameny makes quite a few appearances in Tomcat. The text reveals Frank as a committed Mattachine activist, scolding uncle, willing to use his basement as storage space for your books, welcoming you and your traveling friend upon your return from your travels. Can you share your impressions of Frank Kameny with readers of GayToday?
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Jack Nichols: Frank Kameny was among the great mentors I chose to educate me. My first contact with
him was when, at a Washington D.C. party in 1960, I overheard him discussing the pioneering writer, Donald Webster Cory. Kameny was openly anti-racist and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had long been an inspiration to me but it was suddenly through my discussions with Kameny that I realized how civil rights strategies could be applied as well to the gay movement. There was a need for civil rights, direct action activism to supplement or supplant the national movement's 14 low-key research and social service groups. Kameny was the first gay man to challenge the United States Government's anti-gay policies at the Supreme Court. Because he'd lost his job, he couldn't afford a lawyer and so he wrote his own brief. That brief was a very strong statement that presaged many of our future Mattachine Society of Washington strategies. In early 1961 I studied it incessantly. Four years later-in July, 1964, Kameny would deliver a groundbreaking speech to the New York Mattachine Society. That speech can be found in Speaking for Our Lives published by Harrington-Park Press (Haworth) and it shows what we were accomplishing under Kameny's leadership in the Mattachine Society of Washington. Dr. David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare also emphasizes the importance of Kameny's early work in the nation's capital. |
 Jack Nichols is shown here in 1998 with Franklin E. Kameny, Ph.D. his early 1960s Mattachine movement mentor who was also the first gay man to carry his protest against anti-gay government policies to the U.S. Supreme Court |
Raj Ayyar: Warren, the first character we meet in The Tomcat Chronicles, appears to be a prefiguration of your longtime companion, the late Lige Clarke. In fact, the similarities in terms of their Appalachian pasts seem so pointed that I thought Warren was Lige disguised till Lige makes his own debut in Chapter 9. Did you infuse a wee bit of Lige into Warren's character, or is he a just a precursor?
 Lige Clarke (shown here) and Jack Nichols wrote I Have More Fun with You Than Anybody, published in 1972. It was the first non-fiction memoir by a male couple |
Jack Nichols: No, no. Lige and Warren, while both sons of Appalachia, were as different as night and day. I later discovered that Warren, though real, was hardly who I'd allowed myself to think he was. Lige, however, was just such a person. Lige had great patience with me and taught me how to live as I'd never lived before. Warren had simply helped set the stage, launching my obsession with Appalachian men. Next came dear George who told one and all that Hank Williams was the greatest singer and composer… ever. But it was Lige who fulfilled my fantasies by showing me over many years that he wasn't a fantasy. The Tomcat cover shows a nude Lige (from behind) standing on his head in an upside-down yoga pose. He's shown in full lotus, his legs crossed. I'm shown at age 23, dressed in a white tee-shirt.
Raj Ayyar: Reading Tomcat, I was struck by a dichotomy that runs through the characters in the text: superficial city slickers versus erotic, caring hillbillies. Is that a fair reading?
Jack Nichols: The dichotomy you mention does appear, but it appears as my fantasy of the ideal man of nature, one who is independent, self-contained and freely passionate as opposed to a seemingly more structured, fashion-oriented, urban dweller. But there are some good city folks discussed in the book too, like John, a benefactor in Chicago. Giving and helping were more important to him than simply getting his.
Neither Warren nor George - as handy as they became in 1961 for me to hang my nature-man fantasies upon - were hardly very independent-minded, for example. They were, at the time, dependents. My as-yet unresolved macho conditioning found me waxing protective toward them. |
Raj Ayyar: The constant on-the-road rhythm of Tomcat suggests an updated, gay-positive, sexually explicit Beat novel. Did the Beat tradition influence the writing of Tomcat in any way?
Jack Nichols: Dr. Vern Bullough suggested something similar, that The Tomcat Chronicles is my version of Jack Kerouac's Beat classic, On the Road. In fact I never got around to reading On the Road. Many years later, in the early 70s, Allen Ginsberg presented me with a poem he'd written for publication in GAY.
But I'd never self-identified with Ginsberg, even though I liked some of the things he championed. But
no, there was definitely no Beat influence.
Raj Ayyar: Throughout Tomcat I sensed the presence of Walt Whitman's ghost there somewhere--Walt with his exuberant embrace of polysexual possibilities and of all opposites in America and the universe. How has Whitman impacted you as a thinker and a human being?
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Jack Nichols: It would take eons to explain how Walt Whitman has impacted me. Edward Carpenter self-identified as the moon, announcing that Whitman was his sun and that Whitman was reflecting in him. That's how I feel. A Whitman moon. When young, I purposely began absorbing Whitman's amazing thoughts, repeating and memorizing his lines so that I could effectively reflect his insights in my life. Whitman's Leaves of Grass without a doubt, has been the most powerful literary influence on me, period. I like the third edition best, 1860.
Raj Ayyar: Are you planning a sequel to Tomcat, specifically exploring your relationships with Lige Clarke and Logan Carter?
Jack Nichols: Among the most satisfying things that have happened to me lately has been the publication of Dr. James T. Sears' Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (Rutgers University Press). Sears is a top-notch scholar and he has used primary materials to describe both
Lige and Logan in that book. The very fact that these two amazing men-my loving comrades-- are so ably remembered refreshes me constantly. While I haven't yet planned a book memorializing them as you mention, it has, nevertheless, occurred to me. Currently an able professor is at work on my biography. I'm
sure he'll see how deeply Lige influenced my value system and how Logan exemplified it.
Raj Ayyar: Reading Tomcat now, there is a curious poignancy about the hot sex scenes, a retro-nostalgia for the halcyon pre-AIDS era. In the '70's and all the way into the '80's, there was a grand sexual democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere, a democracy that reached across barriers of age, looks, skin color in a glorious explosion of promiscuous intimacies. It co-opted every imaginable public space--parks, elevators, the back of Greyhound buses, to name a few. Today, AIDS seems to have put the brakes on this explosion of sexual energy. Do you think we can ever return to the innocence of those days without the inhibiting, condomized 'what's your HIV status?' haunting every sex act? Even when the question is denied in brash acts of 'unsafe' sex, the bogeyman is still there, isn't it?
Jack Nichols: While you are right to say that HIV/AIDS haunts many current-day liaisons, there was a time before penicillin when syphilis was almost equally as haunting. While the pharmaceutical companies profit too much because of AIDS and therefore may neglect researching a cure, I'm optimistically looking forward to the day when there's a drug with curative powers, a kind of penicillin to prevent HIV/AIDS.
Raj Ayyar: Throughout your work, from Men's Liberation to The Tomcat Chronicles I find a passionate plea for androgyny and an attack on machismo and macho posturing, whether straight or gay. Is this your shared space with similar critiques in feminist thought?
Jack Nichols: Machismo. Well, if you watch George W. Bush in stride from his helicopter to the White House, it becomes easier to appreciate the dangers not only of macho posturing but of the insane foreign policies that result from such posturing. George W. remembers living in the painful, shameful shadow of his president-father whose "wimp factor" emerged in the media. George W. fears being called Wimpie, Jr., says my old friend Steve, so as he adopts his imagined presidential strut he protests too much, trying-too-hard to prove he's a wanna-be-warrior-guy. His wave, however, is often out of sync with his butch stride. As he storms forward on the lawn, he looks up at the camera and wiggles the tops of his fingers. I'd just like for him to embrace that silly little wiggle-wave part of his personality, you know, the Wimpy George W. wiggle. If only he could start saying "ta ta" into microphones, and learn to dance the hula, he'd feel free of that macho urge to pretend he's as dangerous as he is. He wouldn't have to pretend that he's a tough and we'd sigh relief as would almost everybody else in the world.
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 Jack Nichols is shown here during the period (1961-62) captured in his new book, The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer
 Jack Nichols, shown in 1962 as he hitchhiked across the Eastern part of the USA, taking care to look as much like a hillbilly as he was able while fleeing, for a time, his city slicker roots
 Jack Nichols in Washington D.C. (February, 1963) in the days following his wild and wooly adventures during a hitchhiking spree in the company of a handsome hillbilly |
I admire many of the feminist pioneers like those in HBO's Iron Jawed Angels, one of my favorite feminist films. I recently enjoyed a third showing of Diary of a Mad Housewife, a black comedy that puts me in stitches. But my own critiques of machismo came mostly from my personal experiences and talks with Lige and Logan and, in part, from having seen Walt Disney's Pinocchio in 1944 when I was six.
That film was the story of a wooden puppet, striving to become a real boy. When Pinocchio goes to Pleasure Island and plays pool with the tough boy, Lampwick, the two of them are smoking cigars and drinking beer. The movie's most horrifying scene for me came when Lampwick turned from a toughie into a jackass. When this happens he hee-haws across the screen and I was frightened out of my wits. George W. Bush, I fear, could probably hee-haw like this too.
Raj Ayyar: Is there anything else you would like to share with readers of GayToday?
Jack Nichols: A person's actual life can easily be more fascinating and satisfying than fiction. Instead of asking if there's a mysterious plan for your life, plan your own.
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